ESG Validates IBRIX

IBRIX Inc. announced the availability of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Lab Validation report, IBRIX Fusion: Simple Scalable File System (April 2008). Testing commissioned by IBRIX and conducted independently by ESG, a leading information technology analyst firm, concluded that IBRIX Fusion is well suited for managing data in large-scale grid, cluster, and enterprise computing environments. ESG evaluated IBRIX Fusion’s performance running Kdb, a financial services application, and found that it delivers near perfect linear performance scalability with data of any type or size. The typical workload characteristics of the Kdb application are random I/O with many file metadata operations.

In addition, the ESG Lab validation report, IBRIX Fusion: Simple Scalable File System, explores how IBRIX Fusion leverages standards-based servers and storage to create a fast and scalable networked file system. The storage software was cited for its ability to address the challenge of managing the ever-increasing volume of unstructured file data, particularly in IT environments that need to provide online access to shared files for business critical applications.

“Over the years, ESG has been impressed with IBRIX’s large customer wins in the high performance computing, online services, and media and entertainment markets and more recently its success in grid computing specifically with financial services,” said Claude Bouffard, Lab Engineer, ESG. “During testing, we discovered that the IBRIX Fusion architecture works exactly as advertised—it is scalable and fast for a wide variety of applications, it is fault tolerant, and its factory-install configuration makes it easy to deploy. The software also works seamlessly with any hardware solution and its performance numbers are impressive, but the bottom line is that IBRIX Fusion delivers excellent price-performance.”

Among the report’s key findings:

• Throughput is fast, regardless of file size or type. Unlike competing solutions, IBRIX Fusion ensures high performance when managing large files, small files and a high volume of files simultaneously. During ESG Lab testing on three servers, time-sensitive small file workloads scaled up to 75,000 NFS file operations per second and delivered up to 1,585 MB per second of aggregate throughput.
• Factory-installation eases deployment and configuration. IBRIX solutions are configured in the factory and sold by major systems and storage vendors including Dell, EMC and HP, which virtually eliminates any configuration challenges. In ESG Lab testing, IBRIX-enabled servers were configured in less than two minutes.
• A Scale-Out architecture speeds workflow and drives revenue-generating processes across a wide variety of applications. In addition to its proven ability in media and entertainment, Internet services and high performance computing customer deployments, ESG Labs found that IBRIX Fusion works well for financial services applications. In a real-world stock ticker analysis program, IBRIX Fusion improved processing speeds by three times and clocked in at an outstanding rate of 264 MB/sec for a single stream read.
• Online capacity addition is quick and transparent. ESG Labs configured a factory-installed 84 TB IBRIX Fusion file system on two servers direct attached to trays full of SAS drives in five minutes and ten mouse clicks, without interruption to client access.
• Specialty features are highly reliable and introduce additional benefits.  For example, when deploying IBRIX Fusion file system failover feature, data automatically migrated to remaining segment servers in the cluster after simulated hardware and component failures were introduced by ESG Lab testing.

“Our solution has been deployed and working successfully in many enterprise customer environments.  Receiving this independent product validation from ESG, a firm well-regarded for its industry and technical expertise, takes IBRIX one step further in demonstrating our growing impact on the enterprise storage market,” said Milan Shetti, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, IBRIX. “IBRIX Fusion’s unique ability to speed workflow and deliver predictable scalable access will continue to be extended to reduce cost and complexity for enterprise storage environments serving a broad spectrum of applications and users.”

 

IBRIX, Inc.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)